Coral Davenport has a thorough account of the very sad tale of Tim Pawlenty's embrace and subsequent abandonment of cap and trade. Pawlenty initially took up the cause with a fervor that was quite literally religious:
Pawlenty also had a personal motivation. As an evangelical Christian, he had been brought to believe in the urgency of climate change by his pastor, Leith Anderson, who earlier in 2006 had banded with a group of other evangelical leaders to challenge the Bush administration on global warming. In a letter to the president, they argued that there was no longer a legitimate scientific debate on the merits of climate science and that evangelicals had a moral obligation to solve a problem that threatened the world’s most vulnerable inhabitants. (Anderson is now president of the National Association of Evangelicals.)
See full Article.